Bill Ward: On Simon Cowell, Coronation Street and dancing in his pants in front of 1,000 Spice Girls fans

Bill Ward, 46, is best known as Charlie Stubbs in Coronation Street. He now plays a Simon Cowell-esque character in Spice Girls musical Viva Forever!

Bearing in mind what a laugh it is, why do you think Viva Forever! got such spectacularly bad reviews?
I honestly don’t know why it got those reviews. Critics are entitled to their opinion but I think with something like this, it’s not about the critics, it’s about doing it for the audience and everyone seems to be having a very good time.

The show is about The X Factor but you don’t watch much TV…
I watched The X Factor for the first time for eight years doing research on this and I really enjoyed it. I was surprised. I don’t think I’d watched it since it was Pop Idol. It’s great drama, great entertainment and great television. It was a guilty pleasure for me while I was researching this.

But Viva Forever! is quite critical of the whole talent show thing, isn’t it?
Viva is a modern morality tale. It’s about what happens when a girl and her band go on a reality show and how she copes with the fame and fortune heaped upon her. Jennifer [Saunders, who wrote it] is a very funny woman, so it’s a very funny script. It’s quite a zeitgeisty story about selling your soul to the Devil, about fame and fortune and reality TV with some really great songs. As a straight man in his thirties when they were big, I wasn’t exactly the Spice Girls’ target audience and didn’t really know the songs but they are really strong.

If you only watched the last series of The X Factor, you’ve not seen much of Simon Cowell, who your character is sort of based on…
I talked to Jennifer about it and she said she was mostly basing him on Nigel Lythgoe, which is one of the reasons I went back and looked at Pop Idol. I’m not basing it specifically on Simon Cowell. I looked at all the ‘straight talkers’ on those shows: your Craig Revel Horwoods, your Simon Cowells, your Gary Barlows.

The joke about you wearing a corset is aimed at Simon Cowell though, isn’t it?
You’ll need to speak the choreographer about that. It was her gag but it’s about vanity. That scene in particular is about appearances being deceptive and how everything you see on TV is not necessarily what it seems. I’ve got him picking his toenails and eating them. It’s about those people being normal, farting and smelling but when you spruce them up for TV, they look magnificent.

You don’t look bad in your underpants for a man of 46.
Well, thank you very much. It’s not something I make a habit of doing, dancing on stage in front of 1,000 people in my pants. It was tricky the first couple of times I did it. Standing in front of anyone in your pants is always going to be difficult.

It’s quite a saucy show, isn’t it?
I guess so. It’s just a musical. It’s just good fun and that’s all it is really.

You’re quite a veteran of musicals…
It says on the internet I’ve been in The Lion King but I haven’t been anywhere near it, though I’d love to do it. I’m a jobbing actor and I like the breadth of roles: I did The Tempest and a Eugene O’Neill last year.

Is it annoying that, even though you do Shakespeare, you’ll always be ‘Coronation Street actor Bill Ward’?
Not to me I’m not. I don’t watch Coronation Street and never did really but I hear it’s great at the moment and I keep in touch with a lot of the people from those days.

They still refer to Tracy Barlow smashing your head in on Coronation Street to this day.
Do they? I’m glad Charlie Stubbs has got some sort of notoriety. He was a very nasty piece of work. When Corrie mentioned there was going to be an abuse storyline, I wanted to get it as right as I could and I spoke to Women’s Aid, who are the national domestic violence charity. Now I’m an ambassador for them, trying to raise their profile because one in four women will be in an abusive relationship.

You were a real life Mad Man before you became an actor, weren’t you?
I love Mad Men. I was a strategic planner and an account director for ten years before I left to go to drama school at 32. With Mad Men, they’ve really done their research in terms of what happens in agencies and Don Draper and all of those characters are very subtly done. But when I was working there in the late 1980s, both of my bosses were women, so I suspect all of that stuff is very much from the 1950s.